JackWhats?

I think the rating is definitely fair. Trade period should be a balance of immediate improvement and future strength, with the balance determined by where the team is right now. I don't think it is unreasonable to say we didn't really made next year's team any stronger. And I think most supporters would think that with a team that includes Petracca, Oliver, May, Lever, Gawn as a our base - that we should be aiming closer to "now" than "5 years from now" when all of those players are gone or beyond their prime. We also went another year without finding a meaningful solution to our ineffective forward line. To my mind - we enter next year with all of the same deficiencies that we have carried for the past 3 seasons, and outside of Pertracca being back - it's hard to see what it is that will make us better next year - at least from a list management perspective. And the rating clearly accounts for the off season drama - which we either caused or let happen through poor management - and given it centred on trades - its for to include it in our overall grade. Overall - an extra first round draft pick doesn't really make up for the negatives or the lack of more immediate positives - so a C+ is more than fair.

If anyone is particularly interested, this site provides a decent overview of how each club stacks up financially. You can also have a look at each club's annual report. For what it's worth, we are around the middle of the pack for membership revenue per member, above the likes of Essendon, Cartlon, Hawthorn, and North. Some clubs account for different items in different ways (we include fundraising revenue in membership), but overall, we perform about where expected on most items, around the top of the bottom third. http://www.footyindustry.com/?page_id=2946

These things are always pretty rubbish. The experts tend to use their expert opinions to predict the same as the year prior. Out of these 18 experts, 7 of them predicted only 2 changes to the top 8, while 11 predicted only 1 change. In the past 20 years, 2 changes has occurred 8 times, and 1 or less changes has occurred zero times. So the majority of experts have predicted a scenario that hasn't occurred in the past 20 years.

I have the home and away membership, but isn't this actually a little worse, because there isn't any real way to make up for the lost home games played interstate?